Defining the indefinable?

Defining the indefinable?
Louk Box*

Try to define the notion of development and one redefines one’s own ideals. Development then means no more than one’s wish list. Yet we know that development-in-practice has meant ever so many unexpected consequences, failures or misunderstandings. How come?
This was the exact question that we discussed in the working groups during week 1 of the course – and the question that formed the base of the lecture on ‘Theorising Development’. The working groups had done their homework, and made it clear that the notion of development is an ambiguous and multi-facetted one. Each period in (European) history appears to have formed its own conception of ‘good change’ as Robert Chambers has called it. Aristotle, we were reminded, had a view on reform which stressed class or even caste differences: for the citizenry-elite he pleaded one strategy, for the non-citizen-slaves he recommended something else. During the industrial revolution, ‘development’ came to mean as much as the promotion of industrial capitalism on the one hand, and dealing with the victims of capitalism on the other hand. After World War II, Alan Thomas and Jan Nederveen Pieterse stress the ‘modernization’ meaning of development, followed by alternative approaches stressing inequality and human development.
And now, where do we stand? According to Thomas and Pieterse different schools of thought compete for our attention. On the one hand there are the Post-Developmentalists, rejecting the very notion of development as a hoax, or at least the value of development theories (as irrelevant). They form a curious lot, those Post-developmentalists: social constructivists who relativise the notion of development, theoretical anarchists like Easterly who disqualify past theories as ineffective, or political anarchists who reject the State as a prime mover in social development. Are we then left with nothing at all?
Perhaps not. Perhaps there are theories of the Middle Range (as Robert Merton called them) which can help us understand certain phenomena associated with globalisation. Perhaps some of the Golden Oldies of yesteryear can help us interpret some macro-phenomena like increasing inequalities among emerging social classes in the Global South and the North. Take Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation and briefly mentioned by Alan Thomas. Or perhaps Hardt & Negri, the authors of the most unreadable book of the year 2000, Empire – arguing that a new global social structure is emerging, which sets its own dynamic. And finally, there is the argument by Kofi Annan, reflected in the Millennium Declaration that we need to move beyond traditional development cooperation towards new forms of international commitment and solidarity.
There remains, in other words, enough to wonder about in this curious world called Development Studies, provided we clearly contextualise our notion of development. If we do so, even defining the indefinable becomes possible.

* Column written for participants of the ISS General Course Development Theories and Strategies (24 9 2007)